Rockwell, Carey: Tom Corbett -01- Stand by for Mars. IMP. v2.0 2007-09-29

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'm happy to help if you need any. Feel free to ask.

I think I have figured out why my spell checker crashes in BD. It seems to require a copy of Word to work and while I do have a copy installed it is word '97 so it might not be new enough. Another example of coding that assumes everything is perfect or it crashes. I never saw the need to update my word since I use framemaker for all serious work.

Dale

[JSWolf]

You could do all your cleaning up in Word 97 and then use BD for the final formatting/cleaning up.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You could do all your cleaning up in Word 97 and then use BD for the final formatting/cleaning up.

I have other tools that I prefer for initial cleanup. I haven't had much luck using word as input to other book builders such as mobi and eti. I haven't tried it as an input to BD but I am not happy with BD as a source for imp files anyway. I tried to use it for the last imp file I submitted (the biography of Buffalo Bill) but finally gave up since it wouldn't give me the control I wanted. (I am a nitpicker for quality and visual appeal.) I was able to get curly quotes and other special characters into BD but the font size, widow/orphan control, margins, spacing between paragraphs, and other issues finally made me abandon it for now.

By the way, I happened to find your book on how to use BD in the Sony section. Good job (although you stopped short of the curly quotes issue). That manual needs to be put somewhere where more people other than Sony users can find it. I was only studying BD primarily to honor your request for Melinda's book but now that Fan Fiction has been banned I have no real need to use BD any longer. When I replace my 1150 someday I may revisit that decision.

Dale

[JSWolf]

I get the curly quotes by loading into Word and doing a replace for all the quotes. Then I replace all the apostrophes as well.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I get the curly quotes by loading into Word and doing a replace for all the quotes. Then I replace all the apostrophes as well.

That is one way. It can also be done directly in BD.

You can use the search and replace dialog to do it.
Use the Insert > Special Symbols to get the curly quotes or whatever you need.
You cannot place these characters directly into the search/replace dialog but you can place them in a document. Place a sample in the document and then copy or cut the sample. Now paste the sample in the search/replace dialog. Don't worry that it may not look ok in the dialog. Just go ahead and perform the substitution and it will be ok.

Dale

[JSWolf]

How do you get the proper curly quotes for the ending and beginning quotes?

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

How do you get the proper curly quotes for the ending and beginning quotes?

The hard way. I search/replace for ." - ," - !" - ?" - "space - and sometimes -" or even '" depending on the book contents. This gets the right one and then all the others are left ones.

Single quotes are even harder. I search for space' and "' for the left one and then all the rest are right ones. Except this falls down when the book uses dialects and has words with missing leading characters. If I know it does this I manually fix them after the fact using a search for left ' or sometimes if I know the dialect word beginning I will search and fix it using search and replace.

Sometimes I get lucky on PG books when they use `` and ''

Not easy, have you got a better way? By the way, I am planning to automate this somewhat with a sed script.

Dale

[JSWolf]

MS Word does it fairly well. And if I see a mistake as I am reading, I'll go back to the source file and fix it. If it's a mistake that will be more then once, I'll fix all of those too. It's not 100% perfect all the time, but it's a lot better then manually replacing.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

MS Word does it fairly well. And if I see a mistake as I am reading, I'll go back to the source file and fix it. If it's a mistake that will be more then once, I'll fix all of those too. It's not 100% perfect all the time, but it's a lot better then manually replacing.

I'll give it a try but I hate proof reading in word. Of course I am not really doing it manually but using global replace commands in the editor. It actually goes pretty fast but I am likely to write a sed script one of these days to automate the process. I can also use an emacs macro to get almost the same effect.

Dale

[JSWolf]

Once you have the quites and apostrophes fixed, you can then move the book to something else to do the proofing.